This posting on the Billy Bytes blog, http://www.billybytes.com/blog, referes readers to two articles in today’s edition of The New York Times: “Ex-Congressman Sentence to 30 Months in Prison” and “As College Grows, a City Asks, ‘Who will pay?’”

The ex-congressman of the first article is Robert Ney, caught in the web of the self-confessed and already imprisoned “Casino” Jack Abramoff, the subject of numerous Billy Bytes publications’ reports.

Those reports have included the connection between U.S. Congressman Charlie Dent, who misrepresents the 15th Congressional District of the bogus “lehigh Valley” - bogus because the definition and the borders of this fictitious jurisdiction change every 10 years with the national census.

In the last such census, 2000, those borders were changed by the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB), but for statistical purposes only, but usurped by federal, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey officials for self-aggrandizing political gain.

These officials include those of both states who met on or about June 20, in the Harkers Hollow Country Club in Harmony township, Warren County, New Jersey, a meeting descirbed the Easton, Pennsylvania, head-quartered newspaper The Express-Times, with circulation in both states, by reporter Anthony Salamone.

Salamone attended the meeting with his boss, the paper’s president and publisher, Martin K. Till, who helped organize the meeting and acted as its moderation, in obvious violation of journalistic canons.

The meeting was also attended by Phillipsburg native Michael Perrucci, a principal of the Las Vegas Sands Casino and of BethWorks, which plans to build a casino on a 126-acre parcel of the defunct Bethlehem Steel Corporation’s 1800 acres on the banks of the Lehigh River in Bethlehem’s South Side neighborhood, site of Lehigh University.

Perrucci, Till, Lehigh University, and other private, non-profit, tax-exempt entities including Northampton Community College, Lafayette College, and now even Centennary College in Warren County, and the Binney & Smith (now Crayola LLP) form the Dent nexus.

Dent has introduced legislation that would prevent so-called “off-reservation” ownership of casinos by Native-Americans like the Delaware-Lenni Lenape Tribe of Oklahoma, for these two purposes: first, to prevent Native-Americans, in Dent’s case the Delaware-Lenni Lenapes, from owning and operating a casino on 315 acres in Forks Township, Pennsylvania, on a parcel of which is located the Crayola Headquarters - acreage the Delaware-Lenapes allege was stolen from them by Pennsylvania founder William Penn’s son Thomas in 1737 through forgery and other frauds.

Dent’s second motive was to eliminate the Delaware-Lenapes as a potential competitor to the Las Vegas Sands Casino planned for BethWorks, a site pre-selected by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Las Vegas, and California politicans, corporate heads, and public officials, including Pennsylvan’s Governor Edward G. Rendell, legislature, and courts, including the Commonwealth’s supreme court.

This is the golden goose egg that hatched the obscene pay raises for the members of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of Pennsylvania government.

For Pennsylvania taxpayers, however, it was a rotten egg, one leading to public outrage that discouraged many legislators from seeking re-election and to the defeat of many of those who had the temerity to run.

The outrage also led to the failure, unprecedented in Pennylvania, of one Pennsylvania supreme court justice for retention in office, and almost led to the failure of a second supreme court justice to win retention.

And this leads to the second article in today’s edition of The New York Times, “As College Expands, a City Is Asking, ‘Who Will Pay?”

To build public support for the casinos, and to bribe the prestigious support of Pennsylvania’s institutions of higher learning, Rendell and the legislators in 2004 enacted the Keystone Innovation Zone (KIZ), designed to lend financial support to the Commonwealth’s colleges and universities, including those that are private and not state or state-related, such as Franklin and Marshall College, Lafayette College, and Lehigh University.

For example, in August 2004, Rendell came to Lafayette College’s Morris R. Williams Visual Arts Center located off-campus and awarded Lafayette College and the City of Easton $9 million under the KIZ legislation.

The purpose of this grant was to help finance Lafayette’s expansion into the Bushkill Creek Corridor between N. 13th Street and Larry Holmes Drive, in a flood plain bordered by ecologically sensitive steep slopes.

This flood plain and these steep slopers are already dotted with Lafayette College buildings financed by, in addition to KIZ funds, Northampton County’s General Purpose Authority.

The GPA’s authority is required for the low-interest (below prime rate) loans that helps fuel Lafayette’s expansion.

A percentage of these loans is then plowed back into the GPA to help sustain the college’s continuing, encroaching expansion into the City of Easton’s residential and business neighborhoods that are taxed.

Lafayette College, of course, is tax-exempt, and it has never been willing to pay an in-lieu of tax, or PILOT, to defray the cost of operating and maintaining Easton, a city officially designated by the Commonwealth as “financially distressed.”